‘No Other Option’

All summer, Cheyenne Somers and her family had been watching and waiting, hoping the male relative who had driven her aging aunt across the border to Mexico against her will would bring her back home. But her aunt’s messages, scribbled on a small writing tablet because her worsening aphasia inhibited her ability to speak, and discreetly photographed and forwarded by a friend, were becoming more urgent: “Please help me.” “He locks me in the house and won’t let me leave.” “I need to get out.” 

Then, in the photos, her face began appearing visibly bruised.

“That was when it changed for me, where I was like, ‘We need to do something. She’s trapped,’” recalls Somers. “It was emotionally untenable for me to sit in the situation and not do anything.”

Somers had just graduated from law school in May 2022 and was about to start practicing at Griffiths Law in Lone Tree, where she’d been a paralegal and law clerk for several years. Her mom’s sister, a former family law attorney now in her mid-70s, was ready to make the transition to an assisted living facility, and her loved ones were working to make that happen when the abduction happened. 

They began by pleading with the abductor by text and email to return Somers’ aunt, but he refused. Even though Somers knew the address of the house in the Central Mexico desert where her aunt was being held, the site didn’t show up on Google Maps and the like. So Somers reached out to the consulate in the U.S. Embassy to see if someone could check on the elderly woman. The man she spoke with was sympathetic, but not ready to act.

“I hate seeing people that I’m close with struggle,” Somers says. “And it was also really difficult to watch somebody who had been the family figure, very much in control of her career and her life, be taken advantage of and manipulated.”

The tipping point came in early October, when the tablet photos clearly showed a growing desperation, and the abductor began making unreasonable demands in exchange for her release.

Somers went to work securing her aunt’s passport, along with the documents and funds required by the assisted living facility, and orchestrating a rescue mission to Mexico with the FBI and local authorities. “I didn’t really care that [the abductor] was older and stronger than me and had more of the upper hand,” she says.

She also relied on the planning and strategy skills she would soon use as a full-time attorney. “In my law practice, I’m planning my way through a crisis type of situation where it’s not going to be perfect. And when things fall into place, they may fall quickly and you have to be ready to move before you’re ready. But in the end, you just have to pick the best path you’re given and go.

“I was definitely out of my league in the sense of doing it on my own,” she adds. “But I knew that if I didn’t go, nobody was going to do it. The night before, I was like, ‘Oh man, I may have overplayed my hand here. This may not be the safest decision I’ve ever made.’”

She pushed through her worries. Coordinating with an FBI special agent, Somers landed in Guanajuato and rode in a private car to the general attorney’s office, where they were met by a heavily armed guard who didn’t speak English. After an unnerving wait, a translator arrived and Mexican authorities ushered her into an unmarked van for the 90-minute back-country drive to the house where her aunt was confined. There, Somers waited in the vehicle, listening to the tense shouting match between the agents and the abductor. 

“And then,” she says, “I saw my aunt come to the door.”

Somers stepped out of the van and heard herself say, “Let her go. We’re done here.”

By now, the elderly woman was quite frail, and her condition had become so pronounced she could barely talk. Her abductor retrieved the tablet from the house, confident he could intimidate her into saying she didn’t want to leave. Somers looked her aunt in the eye and firmly said, “This is your one chance. If you don’t say yes, nobody can ever come back for you.” 

As soon as the aunt wrote “yes” on the board, the agents opened the tall gate and, Somers says, “We took her, we put her in the van, and we drove off.”

The next morning, the two women flew to Houston, where Somers’ sister and the assisted living facility were located. Somers started her new job in Denver the following day.

Looking back, she’s proud of how she was able to keep her composure. “It was more of getting in the mindset that this is a goal and a mission, and a thing that you need to complete. There’s no other option.” Going to Mexico alone might have actually worked in her favor, she says. “If I had brought somebody with me, the different entities may have felt as though I didn’t need help. But being a younger female, I think they were more willing to help me.”

Her aunt lived peacefully at the assisted living facility for the final year and a half of her life. No charges were ever filed against the abductor. Now and then, Somers’ mom reminds her, “I knew [your aunt] would help you in your legal career. I just didn’t know that it would be by giving you the confidence that you can do things like that.”

The lesson has stuck with her. “When things get really hard or I’m afraid to do a new thing at work, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, if you can do that, then you can certainly do a deposition or this trial,’” Somers says. 

“Nothing is probably going to be as scary or as stressful as that, ever again.”